Tag Archives: question

It’s October ….how is that possible….only a few days ago was the day of the funeral….then a wonderful, beautiful time at loving relatives for a first meal without a deeply loved person…. no, it was a year ago….time passes, healing happens.

October.

October questions…today I asked a boy what October meant. Learning is so strange…..a word follows a golden thread on and on….

Shorter days….the boy of summer said…”I don’t like it. It gets cold”. Why? I asked. “I’ll google it.” …. he walks over to the computer….. amazing world….I would have had to go without october knowledge….but this mere boy has the world ….. all of knowledge – well most of it….. the Library of Congress may have less.

“What did you find?” …. “Whats a Gregorian Calendar?” was his answer? Serendipity intervenes…..”What is a Gregorian calendar?” I respond….I get the – you aren’t going to tell me look again – then a “wait a minute”..

October….10th month of the Gregorian Calendar…. a calendar that came about because the Romans – actually Julius Caesar – made a calendar …..the Julian Calendar….it was a calendar that was off by 11 1/2 minutes a year from the real passage of the sun through our glorious sky. 11 1/2 minutes….. “why would that be a big deal” summer boy said.

“How much time is that in a decade”? ….. “115 minutes was the answer after a few minutes of blunt pencil scribbling…. decades became centuries…… the sixteenth century finally makes it onto the yellow pad… “How many days is 14,400 minutes?” ….. more scribbling….furrowed brows…time passes…. “10 days?” summer boy asks with a question in his voice… “What do you think?” I, his maddening tutor asks. “Yea that’s it”.

“If a year is a century it’s a leap year if it divides by 400”.. “right”, tutor replies …. thunder rolls, lights blink…..summer boy grabs the computer screen and says “Don’t you dare”…..

“We use this thing….now” summer boy says with surprise…. “Why?”…. “cause it works. It only gets off 1 day every 3,320 years”. Summer boy does an awe inspiring pantomime of a person about to faint.

………………………

So people went to sleep on night and woke up 10 days later in 1582….. and because of that before we were through today a boy learned about the sun, the orbit of the Earth, time, math, multiplication, Pope Gregory, century upon century….more and more…hours passed…the golden thread of the question had laid out a tapestry of knowledge for summer boy and I….

Curriculum on curriculum… because of October…. the tenth month that shares its first day with January in years that are not leap years….in those years October and January start on the same day of the week….

October is alone, lonely in leap years…. no month agrees to put its’ first day on the same day of the week as October….

One day in 3,320 years……Pope Gregory figured it out…. and today many summer boys would never know….